June 27 - July 10, 2016

Newsletter

June 27, 2016

Faculty News

Research:

In addition to the four Cross-Disciplinary Research Fund (CDRF) grants to SEAS faculty reported in the last issue of the SEAS newsletter, GW’s Office of the Vice President for Research awarded three, one-year, $45,000 CDRF grants to the following SEAS faculty:

Prof. Lorena Barba (MAE) has been awarded a Microsoft Azure Research Award consisting of $20,000 of sponsorship for cloud computing resources for research.

Prof. Hyeong-Ah Choi (CS) has received a one-year, $75,000 grant from InterDigital Communications to do research to explore physical layer information for securing the Internet of Things.

The National Science Foundation has awarded Prof. Howie Huang (ECE) a three-year $450,000 grant for his project on accelerating graph traversal on GPUs. Graph analytics is crucial to a wide range of big data applications from social network analysis, to biological network simulation, to cybersecurity. This award advances the state-of-the-art of graph analytics by achieving exceptional performance on large GPU-based supercomputers. High-performance graph computing has many practical usages, such as providing targeted recommendations for e-commerce, or identifying persons of interest and suspicious behaviors in social networks.

The Department of Energy has awarded a one-year, Phase 1, $150,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant to Tech-X Corporation and GW for the project “Software for the Predictive Synthesis of Nanoparticles in in Plasmas.” Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE) is the co-PI on the grant and will lead the research for GW. The project aims to develop an advanced model for the plasma-based synthesis of nanostructures. GW’s portion of the grant is $34,945.

Conferences & Presentations:

On May 27, Dr. Jin-Hee Cho (CS, adjunct faculty) gave an invited talk at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science’s Cybersecurity Research Center, located in Daejeon, South Korea. Her talk was titled “Trust for Cybersecurity in Tactical Networks.” While in South Korea, Dr. Cho also participated in NetSci 2016, where she presented three posters: 1) Dynamics of Uncertain and Conflicting Opinions in Social Networks; 2) Cyber War Game in Temporal Networks, and 3) Privacy and Social Capital in Online Social Networks.

Prof. Murray Loew (BME) served as discussion leader for the session “Computational Imaging” at the Gordon Research Conference on Image Science, held June 5-10 in Easton, MA.

Prof. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) was an invited presenter recently at the IEEE Communications Society's Summer School in Trento, Italy. The summer school is intended for doctoral students from around the world and covers hot topics in communications. Prof. Subramaniam’s lecture covered data center networking.

Other News

Prof. Lorena Barba (MAE) was interviewed by staff of Gelman Library for Vision Magazine on her stance regarding open access in research and open educational resources. The full interview was published online (and a shortened version appears in the printed magazine).

Prof. Ken Chong (MAE) was in Hong Kong June 12-17 at the invitation of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. While there, he served on an engineering panel for research proposals in the General Research Fund and conducted a site visit to the University of Hong Kong. Approximately 3,000 proposals were submitted in engineering, sciences, medicine, business, and other areas; nearly 36% of the engineering proposals were funded. Some proposals included U.S., U.K., and other collaborators. U.S. professors are encouraged to collaborate with their counterparts in Hong Kong.

Dr. Rachael Jonassen (EMSE and CPS, visiting scholar and part-time faculty) has joined the editorial board of Archives of Environmental and Occupational Health. She accepted this position to assist the journal in expanding its coverage of “wicked problems” and their complicated social dimensions. Her professional focus is climate change.

Student News

The SEAS Rocket Team successfully launched its student-designed and -built rocket, Gyro George, at the 11th annual International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC), held June 16-18, in Green River, UT. Team members who attended the competition include recently graduated and current SEAS students: John Manning (Team Leader), Pat Brehm, David Kohanski, and Adrian Haber. The team’s advisor, Prof. Murray Snyder (MAE), also attended.

On July 1, Scott McQuade, a Ph.D. student advised by Prof. Claire Monteleoni (CS), will present a paper at the Data Science for Macro-Modeling with Financial and Economic Datasets workshop that will be held during the SIGMOD/PODS 2016 conference. The paper is: S. McQuade and C. Monteleoni. “Online Learning of Volatility from Multiple Option Term Lengths.”

At the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), held June 19-24 in New York City, Ph.D. student Cheng Tang presented her first-author paper: C. Tang and C. Monteleoni. “Convergence rate of stochastic k-means.” Cheng presented at the workshop Advances in Non-convex Analysis and Optimization. Her advisor, Prof. Claire Monteleoni (CS), also attended the conference, which is one of the top two international conferences in the field of machine learning.